NOAA Regional Administrator John Bullard announced last month in advance of the December council meeting that NOAA did not have the budget for a third year of 100 percent subsidy of at-sea monitoring, a requirement on about one third of groundfish trips. Each trip that is monitored pays $300 to the contractor. Bullard’s office has said the cost of monitoring is about $6-7 million a year. Read more here
NILS STOLPE: The New England groundfish debacle (Part IV): Is cutting back harvest really the answer?
While it’s a fact that’s hardly ever acknowledged, the assumption in fisheries management is that if the population of a stock of fish isn’t at some arbitrary level, it’s because of too much fishing. Hence the term “overfished.” Hence the mandated knee jerk reaction of the fisheries managers to not enough fish; cut back on fishing. What of other factors? They don’t count. It’s all about fishing, because fishing is all that the managers can control; it’s their Maslow’s Hammer. When it comes to the oceans it seems as if it’s about all that the industry connected mega-foundations that support the anti-fishing ENGOs with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in “donations” are interested in controlling. Read the article here
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